Abstract: This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical frameworks).
“Think of MrTaggy as a cross between a search engine and a recommendation engine: it’s a web browsing guide constructed from social tagging data. … The problem with using social tags is that they contain a lot of noise, because people often use different words to mean the same thing or the same words to mean different things. The TagSearch algorithm is part of our ongoing research to reduce the noise while amplifying the information signal from social tags.” (from here)
This paper proposes that digital content’s metadata should not be retained by a specific company but should be part of the content itself- for example, tags on a picture should not only be stored by Flickr but should be attached to the picture itself. The result is that the picture is portable onto websites other than Flickr. Two additional points:
It would be interesting to find out how these tags are generated, for example, if they use dictionaries etc and compare the performance with other techniques.
Justin Donaldson and I have a paper at ISMIR entitled “Uncovering affinity of artists to multiple genres from social behaviour data”. The paper details a project we worked on for the past year or so involving popular music listening activity from a pool of MusicStrands users.
We provide not only the paper, but also the dataset and the code used in our analysis. All of this is available at the website we have set up for the project: http://labs.strands.com/music/affinity/
The main contribution of the project is an analysis and illustration of genres as “fuzzy sets” rather than boolean labels. Through a co-occurence analysis of hundreds of thousands of user playlists, a frequency based “affinity” metric is formed between artists and genres. This affinity metric is a more detailed expression of the style of a given artist’s music. The idea and awareness of predominant genres are a trivial part of any person’s understanding of the vast corpus of popular music. However, genres typically are used as Boolean categorical labels. I.e. an artist is understood to be associated with only one given genre.
By expressing a connection to multiple genres through our affinity metric, a more detailed picture of the artist emerges. We give a lot more examples in the website, so be sure to check it out. - http://labs.strands.com/music/affinity/
Soon I will team up with Licia and Valentina to study how mobile users may retrieve digital content using tags. We will do so by combining folksonomy and reputation(trust) systems. I will then present our preliminary results at the session on Trust in Percom of Secrypt. For more, pls keep an eye on the comments below this post that will appear at the end of July. In the meantime, here is a fine piece of research on how to automatically tag what people see through their cyber googles
“… the Library of Congress has placed a few thousands of their pictures on flickr. From: http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233
“If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata ”
The amazing pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
When I was searching the IEEE Computer Society site for some research articles, I noticed a recent change: besides the traditional presentation of title, author, abstract, DOI, etc., now it is able to bookmark it with a third party social bookmarking site. Since it is quite interesting, I compiled an incomplete list of social bookmarking sites where you may want to have a try as well: (more…)
From this post: “Raj Kottamasu, a Master in City Planning Degree Candidate at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT has posted his thesis, Placelogging (PDF 12Mb) online which contains a study of the Social Tapestries projects (among others) in relation to urban planning. The thesis looks at Mobile spatial annotation and its potential use to urban planners and designers and is an impressive, readable and stimulating piece of research”.
Soon 